As we approach the eve of the presidential face-off between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, there’s another quieter battle going on between the two.

And when it comes to buying up domain names to protect his brand, Trump’s killing it big time.

He and his Trump Organization own more than 3,600 web addresses, according to the research firm DomainIQ. The vast majority bear the names of his properties, products and progeny. There are 274 domains alone featuring the name of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

Clinton, according to DomainIQ, owns a paltry 70, though none appear to be the kind of derogatory names Trump has registered to ward off Internet haters. Clinton’s family foundation owns 214 domains.

So what are some of the domains Trump has scooped up to keep others from registering them?

There are thousands more where those came from, along with eight domains ending with the extension of “scheme,” eight with “fraud” and eight with “sucks.”

“Domains are cheap,” branding expert Rebecca Lieb told The Associated Press. “Mopping up when somebody acquires a domain and does something malicious with it is expensive.”

True. But there’s also no way to completely stop your detractors in the Wild West of internet domain names. Can’t get your hands on trumpvodkasucks.com? Well, you can always grab trumpvodkareallysucks.com or, using one of the more colorful new domain extensions, trumpvodkaso.sucks.

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Domain-squatting, of course, is not a new sport. For years it’s been common practice among businesses and celebrities to grab and then squat on web addresses that could be used to mock or attack them.

Cable giant Comcast owns ihatecomcast.com, and Verizon holds verizonsucks.com. Colleges have made a habit of buying up versions of their names ending in .xxx to prevent them from falling into the hands of pornographers, and Major League Baseball has registered the names of various teams ending in .sex.

But as an article last year on Huffington Post pointed out, this battle that Trump, Swift and others are engaged in is a no-win situation: The “sheer variety of potential domain names means that it’s simply not possible, even with the kind of budgets available to the Trumps and Swifts of the world, to register them all,” wrote Russell Haworth, CEO of Nominet. And he should know — Nominet ‘s the tech company running the UK internet infrastructure.

Take Our Poll“Donald Trump’s acquisition of up to 3,000 domain names in a bid to stop people discrediting him online shows a lack of understanding of the internet and how it works,” Haworth said. “The sheer number of potentially negative domain names means that the strategy is flawed from the start. So far, Donald Trump’s acquisitions have tended to involve more traditional top-level domains like .com, .net and .org. But with the recent addition of thousands of new top-level domains like .london, .global and .company, his domain bill could be set to increase dramatically.”

That hasn’t stopped Trump and his Trump Organization, which has assembled an impressive collection of web addresses that is far more extensive than that of any candidate before him. He and the Trump Organization own a few hundred more than Target or General Motors.

“Mr. Trump has built a globally recognized, highly successful brand,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email to The Associated Press this week, “and it’s only natural he would attempt to protect his name and his brand in all respects.”

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.

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